Effective and asymptotic criticality of structurally disordered magnets

TL;DR

This paper investigates how structural disorder in magnets affects their critical behavior, showing that different magnetic components can lead to similar asymptotic critical exponents but different effective exponents away from criticality.

Contribution

It introduces a model with randomly varying spin lengths to study disordered magnets and demonstrates their universality class and effective critical behavior through renormalization group analysis.

Findings

Model with random spin lengths belongs to the site-diluted Ising universality class.

Effective critical exponents depend on the properties and mixture of magnetic components.

Effective exponents differ from asymptotic ones away from fixed points.

Abstract

Changes in magnetic critical behaviour of quenched structurally-disordered magnets are usually exemplified in experiments and in MC simulations by diluted systems consisting of magnetic and non-magnetic components. By our study we aim to show, that similar effects can be observed not only for diluted magnets with non-magnetic impurities, but may be implemented, e.g., by presence of two (and more) chemically different magnetic components as well. To this end, we consider a model of the structurally-disordered quenched magnet where all lattice sites are occupied by Ising-like spins of different length $L$. In such random spin length Ising model the length $L$ of each spin is a random variable governed by the distribution function $p(L)$. We show that this model belongs to the universality class of the site-diluted Ising model. This proves that both models are described by the same values of asymptotic critical exponents. However, their effective critical behaviour differs. As a case study we consider a quenched mixture of two different magnets, with values of elementary magnetic moments $L_1=1$ and $L_2=s$, and of concentration $c$ and $1-c$, correspondingly. We apply field-theoretical renormalization group approach to analyze the renormalization group flow for different initial conditions, triggered by $s$ and $c$, and to calculate effective critical exponents further away from the fixed points of the renormalization group transformation. We show how the effective exponents are governed by difference in properties of the magnetic components.